TWENTY

The Battle of Lupercalia

The Thunderhawk was wrecked, a gutted carcass that had survived just long enough to get them on the ground. It would never fly again, but who cared about that? Abaddon staggered from the flames and ruin of the crash site, throwing out hails to the Justaerin.

Two definitely dead, one not responding.

So, call it three dead. About what he’d expected in getting this close to the guns of Iron Fist Mountain. They’d lose more by the time they seized the trenches and blockhouses spread around its base and lower slopes like a steeldust fungus. Gunships flashed towards the mountain, barrages of typhoon missiles rippling from their launchers and shells sawing from their assault cannons and hurricane bolters.

Streaks of artillery and anti-aircraft fire slashed overhead. Explosions, flak and the continuous bray of gunnery dropped a constant rain of dust and ember flare. Storm Eagles made a more difficult target than Thunderhawks, but the sheer volume of fire coming off the mountain was swatting more of them from the sky with every passing second.

The wrecks of dozens of gunships were spread over the low foothills. Crashing hadn’t been the intent of the plan, but it had been a more than probable outcome and an accepted risk. Five hundred Terminators formed up amid the flames and smoke of the crash sites.

The Imperial gunners thought they’d repulsed the airborne assault on their right. They were wrong. Just because an aircraft went down didn’t mean the warriors within were dead.

Especially if those warriors were Sons of Horus.

A Storm Eagle slammed down on the rocks to Abaddon’s left. Exploding ordnance mushroomed from the wreckage. Falkus Kibre appeared through the swirl of black smoke surrounding it.

‘Did you even crash?’ asked Abaddon, seeing the Widowmaker’s armour was undamaged by fire or impact.

‘No. Pilot brought us down in the lee of a scarp,’ said Kibre, gesturing with his combi-bolter. ‘Five hundred metres east.’

‘I swear you are the luckiest bastard I ever met,’ said Abaddon, his voice grating and without the powerful tones he had once possessed. The Emperor’s angel of fire had stolen that aspect of him, burned it clean out of him and left him with this gargoyle’s rasp. Barring a few bruises, the Widowmaker had come through that encounter unscathed.

‘The more I fight, the luckier I get.’

Abaddon nodded. He checked the counter in the corner of his visor.

Four minutes.

The smoke and dust of the crashing gunships was still obscuring their presence, but that wouldn’t last for long. The thunder of artillery on the plain swelled. Still the heavier guns in the rear, the main assault waves yet to crash home.

‘Everything still on target?’ asked Kibre.

‘Seems to be.’

‘Best find some cover then.’

‘That cliff ahead?’

‘It’s not much.’

‘Best I can see.’

Abaddon nodded and opened the vox to the Justaerin.

‘New assault position,’ he said. ‘Advance to my marker and keep your damn heads down.’

‘Inspiring,’ said Kibre. ‘I can see why Lupercal made you First Captain.’

‘Now’s not the time for inspiring,’ said Abaddon. ‘Now’s the time to hope the damn Mechanicum don’t miss.’

Var Zerba was one of the oldest defence platforms orbiting Molech, and had accrued a sizeable arsenal over the decades. Torpedo racks, missile tubes, mass drivers, collimated boser weapons and innumerable batteries of macro-cannons had been designed with the goal of smashing attacking fleets to ruin.

But such weapons were equally capable of wreaking havoc on planetary targets.

Ezekyle Abaddon had seized Var Zerba virtually intact, and the frigates, Selenar’s Spear and Infinity’s Regret had almost burned out their reactors dragging it from its geostationary position over Molech’s oceans to a point fixed just above the agri-belt north of Lupercalia.

Farther west of the battlefield to account for the planet’s rotation, but otherwise in the perfect position to wreak havoc from above.

Orbital barrages were not subtle weapons, nor were they discriminate. Their use during battlefield operations was almost entirely unheard of. Their vast quantities of fire were too dangerous, too unpredictable and too destructive should something go wrong. A misfiring munition, a flare of atmospheric discharge or a simple miscalculation could be enough to send city-levelling ordnance wildly off-target.

But when the target was the largest mountain on Molech, perhaps the risk might be deemed acceptable.

The Bloodsworn knelt with their swords drawn and buried in the earth before them. Each warrior had anointed the crimson plates of their armour with the Black, and waited as Warden Serkan moved among them, smearing ash across the winged blood drop on their shoulder guards. As the shells crashed down on the advancing horde he offered each warrior a measure of his wisdom and listened to their last words.

No one was under any illusion that this would be anything other than a last stand. Drazen Acorah knew he would not live to see another sunrise, but the thought did not trouble him overmuch. That they had killed Imperial soldiers in the jungle was not in any doubt, even if he still could not explain how it had happened.

Not only had they murdered innocents and hunted like beasts, but they failed in their duties as exemplars of all that was good and noble in the Legions. The Warmaster had already tarnished the honour of the Legions such that none would ever trust them again, and the Blood Angels had allowed themselves to be party to that.

The Bloodsworn had come to Molech to fight, but they had come to this battlefield to die.

Vitus Salicar stood, and ninety-six Blood Angels rose to their feet behind him, each man holding his blade up to the sky in salute. Not to the enemy; they were unworthy of any recognition. This was a final salute to the Emperor and Terra, to Sanguinius and Baal.

Salicar used an oiling cloth to clean his power sword of dirt, and Acorah saw the ident-tags swing from the blood drop pommel. Acorah needed no psyker powers to feel the weight of guilt attached to them. The rust and unmistakable tang of mortal blood told its own tale.

Salicar saw him looking and sheathed the blade. The ident-tags rattled against the iron and leather scabbard.

‘You are still set on this course?’ asked Acorah.

‘I am,’ confirmed Salicar. He made a fist and lifted his arm, bent at the elbow. Ten Rhino armoured carriers fired their engines, jetting oilsmoke and setting the ground atremble.

‘You should not seek to dissuade me, Acorah. I would not sully this moment with having to discipline you.’

‘I seek to do no such thing,’ he said, though the rebellious thought had already crossed his mind. He’d dismissed it immediately. His powers were strong, but not so strong that he could alter a will so set in stone.

‘Do you believe this is penance?’ he asked.

‘I do,’ said Salicar.

‘You’re wrong,’ said Acorah, placing his hand on the partly obscured Legion symbol at his commander’s shoulder guard. A familiar gesture, almost too familiar. He and Salicar were battle-brothers, but they were far from friends.

Salicar looked down at Acorah’s hand. ‘Then what is it?’

‘It’s justice.’

‘Go!’ shouted Aximand.

Third Squad broke from cover, moving and firing as Ungerran Dreadnought Talon opened fire with their cannons and missile launchers. Streaming salvoes of high-calibre shells and spiralling missiles hammered the line of mesh fortifications. Filled with rubble and stacked like children’s blocks, they were ideal temporary fortifications.

Temporary or not, they were going to be bloody to overrun.

Behind him, the Stormbirds smoked in the flames of impact and hard burn landings. Nearly five hundred Sons of Horus poured onto the rugged landscape of the Untar Mesas, less than a hundred metres from the stepped defences.

No matter whether an assault came by land, sea or air, that last hundred metres would always need to be crossed by warriors willing to face the enemy head on.

This flank of the Imperial line rested on the mountain foothills, stretching away in a gentle crescent until it reached the towering peak of Iron Fist Mountain.

The twenty kilometres between here and there was an unbroken line of Imperial tanks and infantry. Well dug in, well positioned and, by the looks of things, well led. Jaundiced clouds of smoke drifted across the lines, the ejecta of Imperial guns mixed with the explosions of Lupercal’s heavy artillery.

Titans duelled with city-levelling ordnance, the thunder of their steps felt even from here. The Imperator at the centre of the line wasn’t marching. Its upper section turned only enough for it to bring its apocalyptic weaponry to bear. Its guns were tearing bloody wounds in the Warmaster’s army with every shot. Hundreds were dying with every blast of its hellstorm cannon and hundreds more to the plasmic fury of the annihilator. Missiles, laser blasts and hurricanes of bolter fire wreathed its upper towers and bastions in smoke.

Single-handedly, the Imperator was gutting Lupercal’s army.

Or at least the mortal portion of it.

Aximand’s attention was drawn from the destroyer Titan to a flash of brightness at the Titan’s base. Crimson-painted Rhinos surged forward in a wedge to split the attack in two. A glorious charge into the enemy ranks, the kind that only Legion warriors would dare.

‘Bold, but foolish,’ hissed Aximand. The enemy host was too vast for so few warriors to break apart, even warriors of the quality of the Blood Angels.

The hiss of a passing las-bolt brought him back to his own fight.

‘There,’ shouted Aximand, pointing at the base of a stepped salient where a flurry of Stormbird rockets had split the reinforced mesh. Rubble threatened to pour out. All it needed was a little encouragement. ‘Squad Orius, bring that wall down! Baelar, take it when it’s open.’

A burst of missile contrails arced from a patch of rocks to Aximand’s left. A towering explosion of rubble detonated from the defences. Blasted rocks fell in a rain of shattered stone and debris. Even before the dust of the explosion blew out, Squad Baelar were moving. Jump packs flared from the cliff above, where Aximand’s pure assault elements had landed.

Gunfire reached out to them. Six were blasted from the air before they reached the apex of their powered leap.

‘Did you see that?’ asked Yade Durso.

‘I did,’ said Aximand.

‘No mortal shooters did that.’

‘Agreed, that’s Legion.’

Thudd guns punished the defences where the shots had come from, but Aximand knew they’d hit nothing. If he was right in who was there, they would have already displaced. Squad Baelar landed just before the emplaced blocks and braced their legs for another leap.

The ground erupted in a sheet of fire as a line of remote-activated melta mines detonated.

Aximand ducked back as his auto-senses shut down to protect him from the brightness. Squad Baelar were all but incinerated. A single warrior got airborne, but only his upper half. Stuttering jets carried his corpse over the wall.

‘Just far enough away to need two jumps,’ hissed Aximand. ‘They knew assaulters would need to land there.’

‘Definitely Legion,’ said Durso.

‘Not Blood Angels,’ replied Aximand, which left only one possibility. ‘The Ultramarines are here.’

‘Third Squad is in position,’ Durso voxed. ‘Ungerran are ready.’

‘Hit them with everything,’ said Aximand. ‘Maximum suppression. We’re taking this wall ourselves.’

A pressure within Abaddon’s helmet was the first sign of the incoming barrage. His teeth ached and his visor dimmed in anticipation of impact.

‘You’re looking up?’ asked Kibre. ‘Do you want to be blinded?’

‘How often do you get to be this close to such awesomely destructive firepower?’

‘Even once is too often.’

Abaddon grinned, an unusual enough occurrence for him that he surprised himself. Since his injury he’d had precious little to laugh about. The angel’s fire had done more than take his voice, it left him with a constant smoulder in his bones. Like an underground fire that never goes out, but burns and burns even when no fuel remains to sustain it.

‘Think of it this way,’ said Abaddon. ‘When it hits, we’ll either walk right through the ruins or we’ll be dead. Anyway, if I die, Lupercal will need someone to be First Captain.’

‘I don’t want it earned this way.’

Anger touched Abaddon at Kibre’s sentimentality. ‘How else do you think you’ll get it?’

Kibre didn’t answer, and Abaddon turned his gaze to the heavens. Molech’s skies had been ripped with electrical storms and raging atmospheric disturbances since the invasion began. Low-hanging clouds seethed like overloading generators. Finally they burst apart, unable to contain the rampant energies within them.

Forking traceries of blue light arced between them and the mountain’s highest peaks, as though the holdfast were a vast lightning rod. Squalling clashes of expending void shields filled the sky with blooming oilspills of light. The lightning danced on the invisible barrier, stripping it back with every strike.

And with every screeching blast, the void shields grew closer to their extreme tolerances. Like a bubble stretched to its maximum expansion, they screamed as they blew out. A micro-storm blasted skyward as feedback detonated the generators and explosions geysered around the throat of the mountain.

But this was just the precursor.

Glassy rods of laser fire touched the mountain peak, coring deep into the rock. Superheated steam blasted skyward. Spurts of molten rock garlanded the high peak in a fiery golden crown.

Yet even this was a prelude.

Torpedo volleys and macro-cannon shells launched from Var Zerba at hyperfast velocities punched through the clouds on the coat-tails of the lasers. The mountain’s defensive guns sought to bring them down, but the catastrophic detonations of the void shield array had blown out almost every targeting cogitator.

Orbital munitions designed to penetrate subterranean bunker complexes slammed into the mountain, punching into the shafts bored by the orbital lasers. Iron Fist Mountain was hardened to resist aerial bombardment and ground based artillery, but an orbital barrage was many orders of magnitude greater than anything the builders of Legio Crucius had envisioned.

The top five hundred metres of the mountain simply vanished.

Warheads just short of atomic power struck deep into its heart, tearing apart the internal structure of the hollowed out mountain in a hellish firestorm. Vast buttresses of adamantium buckled and melted in temperatures normally found in the cores of stars. Bracing beams and load-bearing archways collapsed and a cascade of structural instability shook the entire mountain.

A flaming caldera formed as the weight of the mountain’s exterior fell inwards. Iron Fist Mountain crumbled like a sand sculpture, every second of collapse adding to the speed of its dissolution. Kilometres-high plumes of explosive gases and dust clouds billowed in a fire-shot mushroom cloud.

The shock wave of impacts and the instantaneous destruction of an entire mountain raced outwards in a pulsing series of seismic pressure waves. Abaddon gripped tightly to the rock as though the earth sought to shake him loose. Explosions of rock and flame shot from the mouth of the newly-formed volcano.

An avalanche of debris spilled downwards, millions of tonnes of shattered rock and steel. A tidal wave of destruction that buried the Imperial defences clustered around the mountain under hundreds of metres of rubble.

‘First Company,’ said Abaddon, as the shock waves began to dissipate.

Five hundred Terminators rose from cover and marched into the hellstorm surrounding the mountain’s destruction.

Vitus Salicar rode at the head of the Blood Angels, his crimson Rhino’s engines roaring like a mesoscorpion in heat. He’d ordered the Techmarines to overcharge the engines. They’d burn out within minutes, metal grinding on metal and erupting in flames as oil feeds burst under pressure. It wouldn’t matter. These Rhinos would never need to move again once this task was done.

‘An end for all of us,’ he said.

They left burning trails behind them where fuel manifolds had already cracked. The flames spread quickly through the fields, and a wall of smoke and fire rose behind them.

There could be no retreat now, even if they desired one.

The traitor line was an unbroken wall of flesh and iron, tanks and marching soldiers as far as the eye could see. Smoke banks from booming artillery obscured the rear ranks. Gunfire snapped and explosions cratered the ground.

Shots punched the up-armoured glacis of his Rhino, but didn’t penetrate. A las-round clipped his shoulder guard, vitrifying the ash and dirt smeared over his Legion symbol. A glassy scab formed over the blood drop.

He looked left and right. Like him, Drazen Acorah and Apothecary Vastern rode in the cupola of their Rhinos, while Warden Serkan squatted atop his vehicle like the savage tribal chiefs of Baal Secundus atop their chariots in ages past.

‘For the Emperor and Sanguinius!’ shouted Salicar as linked bolters on the roof of the Rhino opened fire. A few traitors in deliberately ripped Army fatigues and fetishised helms were punched from their feet.

He picked his target. Army Chimera with the Eye of Horus daubed in umber on the frontal glacis. A banner of ragged cloth streaming behind it with a bleeding eagle upon it. A vehicle for a commander or soldier of rank.

The engine behind Salicar blew out with a hard bang and a solid, concussive thud. He tasted burning promethium and lubricant. The vehicle gave one last spurt of power to the tracks before seizing with a dreadful clash of splintering metal and ripping gears.

The Rhino slammed head on into the painted Chimera. Metal buckled and deformed. The heavier Space Marine vehicle smashed the Chimera’s frontal section like foil paper. Salicar vaulted from the Rhino’s roof, using the collision to propel him deep into the enemy ranks.

His scaled cloak billowing behind him like golden pinions, the captain of the Bloodsworn sailed through the air and crashed down in the midst of the charging traitors. His sword swept out, its edges blazing with amber fire. Men died.

Behind him, the Rhino’s spiked bull bar had disembowelled the enemy vehicle like a carcass on a butcher’s slab. Black smoke billowed as the assault doors opened and the Blood Angels poured out. They slammed into the scattered traitors, bludgeoning them from their path with kite shields and short, stabbing thrusts of their swords.

Salicar moved and killed with grace and beauty, like a dancer whose every move was choreographed to match those of his foes. Mortals tried to cut him down, but his movements were too fast, too supple and too beautiful. His flame-lit edge opened their bodies, his gold-chased pistol spat headshots with every pull of the trigger.

Gun fire struck him on the chest and shoulders. Some of it even cut down the soldiers he was fighting. They knew they couldn’t fight Salicar on an equal footing and were looking to kill him any way they could. He kept moving, putting as many of the enemy around him as he could. If they planned to shoot him down, they would kill their own men to do it.

The Blood Angels formed arrowheads of red-armoured killers around their war-leaders. Warden Serkan smashed through a knot of bare-chested warriors with their flesh scarified by knife blades. His eagle-winged symbol of office carved them new wounds, but none that would ever heal.

Alix Vastern, the Apothecary who knew every inch of human physiology and who had spent a lifetime repairing it, now bent his every effort to destroying it. Drazen Acorah fought with a monstrous twin-bladed axe, hewing a red path through to a squad of augmented soldiers adorned in blood-lined flesh cloaks and whose weapons were those of the techno-barbarians that once warred over the ruined hellscapes of Old Earth.

Salicar pushed through the masses of packed soldiery to link with him. No blade touched him, but las-rounds and solid slugs gouged and bit his plate. In any other fight, the goal was to make space. To move, to find the gaps between the foe and drink deep of the killing thirst. Here, the aim was to fill that space with their flesh, to make them his shields.

All around, the charge of the enemy continued unabated. Chimeras roared past towards Tyana Kourion’s Grand Army of Molech. For all their trappings of savagery, the Warmaster’s army was disciplined.

Salicar beheaded a pair of mortals bearing a heavy bolter and kicked another with a demolition charge in the chest. The man’s ribs shattered and he flew back through the air. The charge he’d carried detonated and tore the sponson from a nearby battle tank. It slewed around and exploded a moment later.

Salicar knelt as the shock wave washed over him.

He rose to his feet and pushed on, his honour guard finally catching up with him. They had discarded their shields. Defence was now irrelevant, attack was all that mattered.

The bladed formations of the Blood Angels converged to form a single spear thrust right through the centre of the enemy. Perhaps a quarter of Salicar’s warriors were dead. Sheer weight of fire had done what the enemy’s individual prowess could not. They fled before his wetted blade. Gunshots smacked his arms and legs.

His visor display flickered with warnings, but he cared nothing for them. He was to die this day, and no warning would change that.

Drazen Acorah now fought at his side, his axe blades gleaming red and wet. His lieutenant saw him and gave a curt nod. All that could be spared in the fight’s fury. Salicar returned the gesture as he saw a hellish fire silhouette the mortals before him.

Acorah cried out and dropped to his knees, the axe falling from his grip. The press of bodies closed on him, knives and rifles and swords stabbing for him. Salicar thrust and cut, keeping the rabble back. A shot smacked into his back, a heavier round. He staggered. Another clipped his helmet and he fell to one knee.

He reached out and gripped Acorah’s shoulder guard.

‘Stand, brother!’ he ordered.

Acorah looked up.

Crackling lines of power hazed his helmet, and the lenses shone with inner light. A blood-red radiance of arterial wonder.

‘It’s here!’ cried Acorah. ‘Throne save us, it’s here!’

Salicar sprang to his feet as a towering fury surged through him, a killing rage like nothing he had ever known.

No, that wasn’t true.

He had known this once before.

Months before in the Kushite jungle. A red mist of unimaginable hatred and rage, the unbridled anger of a million souls. Every hostile thought and primal impulse given free rein.

Salicar gasped, an exhalation of feral savagery.

A figure moved through the flames before him, a warrior of transhuman scale. Its armour was blackened red and wreathed in fire.

Worse, it was armoured as he was. Wreathed by flames that seared the eye, the winged blood drop on its shoulder guard was unmistakable.

Whatever this thing was, it had once been a Blood Angel.

Chains dragged behind it and it hovered a full metre above the bloody ground. Its face was a scorched horror of eternally burning meat, fire-blackened and pulled tight in a rictus grin of horrified anger. In one hand it carried a severed head, that of Warden Agana Serkan.

‘Behold our kin,’ it said, and Salicar felt his ears bleed within his helm.

The mortals gathered around him fell to their knees. No longer seeking him dead, but supplicating themselves to the monstrous hellspawn. Salicar wanted to murder every one of them. Not fight them, not kill them, but slaughter them. He wanted to bathe in their blood, to strip himself of armour and slather his naked flesh with their entrails.

Their hearts he would devour. From their bones he would suck the marrow. Their eyes would be sweet, their blood ambrosia. Salicar’s every civilised move was stripped away as he saw himself drowning in the blood of his kills, each skull taken paving the way for his immortality.

‘This is what you all want, Vitus,’ said the fallen angel, reaching out to him. ‘Accept it. Your brothers have already drunk from the bloody chalice I offered them on Signus. They now slay in my name. They slake their thirst for blood without remorse. I know you felt the echoes of that moment in your own slaughters, Vitus. Feel no guilt for that, embrace the killer angel within. Join your brothers. Join me.’

Salicar felt a presence beside him and reluctantly averted his gaze from the daemon-thing. Drazen Acorah stood at his side, one hand holding his axe before him like a talisman.

‘I name you warp spawn!’ cried Acorah, the witch-light within his helm spreading over his body to envelop the blades of his axe.

‘I am the Cruor Angelus, the Red Angel!’ cried the fire-wreathed abomination as a pair of flaming swords erupted from its gauntlets. ‘Bow down before me!’

Apothecary Vastern moved to stand between the Red Angel and his captain. ‘I know you,’ he said. ‘You are Meros of the Blood Angels! My battle-brother of the Helix Primus, now and always. No power in the galaxy can break that bond!’

‘I am the ragefire, I am the sinister urge, the red right hand and the ender of lives!’ said the warp-thing. ‘Meros is long gone. He and Tagas lit the soulfires within me, but the soul of your primarch and his corruption is the blood in my veins.’

Salicar fought to contain his rage and resist surrendering to its red temptation. Every fibre of his willpower was fraying, searing to ash within his mind. To give in would be easy, to submit and accept the bloodlust within him.

Acorah reached out and placed a hand on Salicar’s shoulder guard. The fulgurite lightning bolt carved through the ash flickered and danced with golden light. Salicar drew a great draught of air into his lungs, like a drowning man finally reaching the surface.

He blinked away the bloody haze that had fallen across his vision. He ripped off his helmet and threw it aside. The fetor of the battlefield waxed strong in his sense. Blood and opened meat, urine and mud.

His Blood Angels knelt in the dirt around him, looking to him for guidance. Traitors surrounded them, looking to them as avatars of murder and slaughter, as newfound gods to worship. The thought sickened him, that they might be venerated by such dregs.

Firelight reflected on the ident-tags wrapped around the pommel of Salicar’s sword. And what had once been guilt became the promise of salvation.

We are the Blood Angels.

We are killers, reapers of flesh.

But we are not murderers, we are not savages.

Vitus Salicar turned so that every one of his warriors could see him. He reversed his grip on his sword. They met his gaze. They knew. They understood. They aligned their blades as he did.

‘Join me,’ said the Red Angel. ‘Be my blood-letters.’

‘Never,’ said Salicar, driving his gladius up through the base of his jaw and out through the top of his skull.

Two Warhounds of Interfector, a snapping engine named Lochon and a limping beast dubbed Bloodveil, gave covering fire. Aximand and the Fifth Company charged under a blitzing hurricane of turbo fire and vulcan shells. Portions of the mesh-block wall had already given way. The new-birthed volcanic explosion on the far flank had toppled loose blocks from the top of the makeshift barricade, and the fire from the two Warhounds did the rest.

‘Over it,’ shouted Aximand. ‘Take the fight to them.’

The Sons of Horus wove a path through the rubble, some firing from the hip, others pausing to aim. Aximand did neither. He kept his weapon pulled tight to his chest. Speed was his best hope of reaching the defences alive.

Ten Scimitar jetbikes flashed overhead, strafing the defenders with heavy bolter fire. Detonations rippled behind the blocks. The jetbikes turned hard, bleeding off speed for a quick turnaround.

A mistake, Aximand knew. As below, so above.

Speed was survival.

Shots from something rapid firing reached up and tore half the Scimitars from the sky, but a trio of larger attack speeders followed up with barking lascannon fire. An explosion clawed skyward, quickly followed by another. Gunfire chased the speeders, but by now the Scimitars were back on station and let rip over the defenders.

The crash of Titans made Aximand look up in time to see Lochon stamp down on a distant section of the walls. Debris spilled out and Sons of Horus swarmed over the breach. Bloodveil shadowed its impulsive cousin, firing controlled bursts of vulcan fire. Ejected shells spat from the rear of the weapon in a waterfall of scrap metal.

Behind the Warhounds came Silence of Death, a Reaver with deep gouges burned into its carapace. It had been wounded in the fight for Molech and one particular burn scar imparted a lopsided grimace to its pilot’s canopy.

The Titan braced its legs, appearing to squat slightly, like an animal about to defecate.

‘Down!’ shouted Aximand, dropping to a crouch with his helmet tucked into his chest as far as it would go. The Reaver’s blastgun and melta cannon fired with a shriek of rupturing air. The path of the weapons ignited, an instantaneous flashburn of light.

Aximand’s armour warned of a cataclysmic spike in temperature that vanished almost as soon as it registered. Thunderclaps of superheated air washed over him in a thermal shock wave.

Paint blistered on his back and shoulders.

Aximand pushed himself upright. The middle of the wall was gone. Apocalyptic explosions had tossed what remained around, leaving the way open for the infantry.

Aximand ran towards the flaming ruin of the wall, threading a path through the blistering heat haze. The rock underfoot was molten and glassy. His auto-senses were lousy with thermals, just a bleeding mass of false target readings.

A series of ferocious explosions hurled Aximand into the air.

Massed battle cannon fire.

He came down hard on the fused remains of a block that had once been part of the defences. He rolled, his armour cracked open in a dozen places. His helmet was split down the middle. He tore it off, and struggled to find his feet. His innards felt like they’d been compressed in a Warlord Titan’s assault fist. Concussive trauma. His lungs fought to take a breath. When they did it was searing hot, painful. He tasted burned meat, scorched metal and stone.

Sons of Horus lay dead all around him, split plates and boiled meat. Yade Durso picked himself up, holding his hand as though he was in danger of losing it. Aximand saw an Interfector Warhound lying across the remains of the wall. One side was ripped away, its mechanical innards spilled and its crew a burned smear on the inner faces of its carapace.

Bloodveil or Lochon, he couldn’t tell.

Vapour ghosts made visibility a joke beyond forty metres. His eyes burned with the acrid fumes of melta residue. Shapes moved in the smoke. Tall, loping. Hunched low and racing through the geysers of superheated air.

Knights. At least a dozen. Aximand struggled to remember the force disposition documents he’d read.

Green and blue heraldry, a fire-topped mountain: House Kaushik. Arcology-dwelling House, low tech resources. Estimated six Knights maximum. Threat level: medium.

Coiled snake icon over a field of orange and yellow. House Tazkhar, southern, steppe-dwelling nobles of noted savagery and cunning. Estimated eight Knights in total. Threat level: high.

They came in pairs; one moving, one shooting. Heavy stubbers raked the walls and thermal cannons stabbed like bright lances through the smoke. Aximand experienced a moment of paralysis when he thought they were coming for him, but the Knights had bigger prey in mind.

Void shield flare blazed like sheet lightning behind him as the Knights went after the remaining Warhound and the Reaver. An unequal fight, but when had that ever mattered? The Knights swept past, over the ruin of the block wall, hunting horns blaring from their carapaces.

Then Aximand saw who was really coming for him.

Armoured in cobalt-blue and gold, a transverse crest of white on a legate’s helmet. Bright silver blades unsheathed.

XIII Legion.

Ultramarines.

The Justaerin were wasted in this fight. Nothing remained of the Imperial right flank. Ashen statues that had once been men, buried wrecks of tanks that had become inescapable ovens. Artillery positions were buried in rock, and the twisted barrels of Basilisks and Minotaurs jutted from drifts of hot ash.

Mewling survivors begged to be pulled from avalanches of rock that were slowly cooking them to death. Abaddon didn’t give them the mercy of a bullet.

He saw a Warlord on its knees, its lower legs fused and melted to the rock of the mountain. Its back was bent as it tried to right itself. All that was keeping it upright were its weapon arms, buried in ash to the elbows. Two Warhounds lay sprawled on their bellies, their canopies cracked open and wounded skitarii frantically digging to reach the crew.

The Terminators killed them without breaking pace.

The real fight was coming to them.

The Imperator Titan was on the move.

In the wake of the Ullanor campaign, Aximand had spoken at length to the warriors of the Ultramarines. It had been a tense time between the XVI and the XIII Legions. Together with the White Scars, the Ultramarines had acted as Lupercal’s unwitting decoy in force while the Luna Wolves struck straight to the heart of the greenskin empire.

Neither Guilliman’s nor the Khan’s warriors took kindly to being used as bait while the glory went to others. Many fanciful stories grew out of that campaign; some aggrandising it, some belittling it, but all agreed on the spectacular nature of the victory, with Horus and the Emperor fighting back to back. Aximand wondered if that particular story would ever be retold in years to come.

Ezekyle had been merciless in his not-so-gentle mockery of the laggardly Ultramarines.

‘Always late for the fight,’ Ezekyle had roared, strutting like a peacock. The challenge had come from a sword-champion named Lamiad, and Ezekyle had accepted. He had a head of height on the slender Ultramarine, but Lamiad had him on his back in under a minute.

‘If you must fight an Ultramarine, you have to kill him quickly,’ Lamiad warned Ezekyle. ‘If he is still alive, then you are dead.’

Sound advice, though until now, Aximand had never realised just how sound. The Ultramarines had seen the threat of the Silence of Death and withdrawn to positions prepared for just such an eventuality. Practical, indeed.

Now three hundred warriors in the blue of open skies came at the scattered warriors of the XVI Legion with hatred in their hearts. Aximand had somewhere in the region of four hundred, but they were scattered and spread through the ruins. At best, he had a hundred, maybe a hundred and twenty immediately to hand.

The odds favoured the Ultramarines.

But since when had that ever mattered to the Sons of Horus.

‘Lupercal!’ shouted Aximand, swinging Mourn-it-all from its shoulder harness. The blade gleamed in the murder-light of battle. The runic script worked into the fuller shone with anticipation.

The Sons of Horus rallied to the Warmaster’s name as Aximand swung his blade up to his shoulder and charged the Ultramarines. Bolter shells filled the rapidly diminishing space between them. Armour cracked open, bodies fell. Not enough to halt the tides.

Aximand picked his target, a sergeant with a notched sword that struck him as being the very antithesis of all the XIII Legion stood for. He would be doing Primarch Guilliman a favour by killing this legionary – what sort of example was he setting his warriors?

The ocean green and cobalt-blue slammed together in a shattering crack of plate and blades. Pistols blazed, swords crashed and armour sundered. Aximand split the Ultramarines sergeant from clavicle to pelvis with one stroke. No photonic edge was ever sharper. He backswung and hacked through a legionary’s waist. The hosts became entangled, a heaving, grunting press of armoured bodies. Too close and cramped for sword work. Aximand slammed the hilt against a warrior’s visor. It cracked and spit sparks. A pistol shot blew it out.

Yade Durso’s sword had broken. He spun through the melee with two pistols. He took shots of opportunity, heads, spines and throats. Like a pistol master of the Scout Auxilia, he never stopped moving.

The fight was brutal. The blue had the better of it, fighting in ordered ranks, like a living threshing machine. Their blades and guns worked tirelessly, as though the Ultramarines fought to the unheard recitation of an unseen combat master.

It was war without heroics, without art.

But it was winning.

Already outnumbered, the Sons of Horus were fighting on their own, each warrior the hero in his own battle. But heroes could not win on their own, they needed battle-brothers. Aximand saw that ego had hamstrung them. They had come to Molech expecting an easy fight. It had made them forget themselves, and the XIII Legion were punishing them for that complacency.

Aximand roared and swung Mourn-it-all in a wide arc, clearing space. Ultramarines fell back from his unnaturally keen edge.

‘Sons of Horus, close ranks!’ shouted Aximand. ‘Show these eastern dogs how the mongrel bastards of Cthonia fight!’

Warriors gathered around him. Not enough to keep them from being pushed from the field, step after backward step.

A warrior of the XIII Legion came at Aximand with a long-bladed polearm. The leaf-shaped blade shimmered with power. It gave him reach. Aximand jumped back as the golden blade stabbed for him. The warrior was a vexillary, Aximand now saw, the long-shafted weapon he bore having once borne a flag. Its burned remains hung limply from corded red fasteners.

‘You lost the standard,’ said Aximand. ‘You ought to impale yourself on that spike of yours.’

‘You will all die here,’ said the Ultramarine.

Aximand turned the polearm aside with Mourn-it-all’s blade. He spun inside its reach. His elbow smashed the Ultramarine’s face.

The warrior staggered, but didn’t fall. ‘If you must fight an Ultrama–’

Aximand plunged Mourn-it-all through the vexillary’s breastplate until the quillons struck the glittering Ultima on his plastron.

‘I know,’ said Aximand. ‘Make sure you kill him.’

From the fire-warmed heat of his war tent, Horus watched a hololithic representation of the battle unfolding. With each update fed into the cogitator by the kneeling ranks of calculus logi, Horus barked manoeuvre orders to Scout Auxilia runners who carried them to the vox-tents.

Beyond the war tent, hundreds of Rhinos, Land Raiders and Thunderhawks waited to carry thousands of Sons of Horus into battle. The remaining Titans of Vulcanum, Mortis and Vulpa were spread through the legionaries. A force capable of utter destruction, but they too waited.

Maloghurst stood at his side, but had said little since the battle’s opening shots. Horus sensed his confusion at giving battle with a full third of the army yet to engage. Horus did not explain. His reasons would become clear soon enough.

‘Ezekyle’s Justaerin are pushing hard for the centre,’ said Maloghurst. ‘The destruction of Iron Fist Mountain has blown the left flank wide open.’

They’d felt the monstrous shock waves of the orbital barrage from Var Zerba like the rumblings of a distant earthquake. Fire-streaked smoke spread like embers on the horizon. It would rain ash for weeks, turning the entire agri-belt into a benighted wasteland.

‘Ezekyle will need support if he’s not going to be annihilated by Paragon of Terra.’

‘He’ll have it, Mal,’ Horus assured him.

‘From where, sir?’ said Maloghurst. ‘The Red Angel was supposed to drive the Blood Angels into madness, to break the centre for our Army forces to exploit. But the sons of Sanguinius are dead, and our centre has yet to make any significant impact. They’re dying in droves out there.’

Horus gestured over the hololithic display, already knowing what he would see. The Imperial guns were decimating his Army units at the heart of the advance. The fields before the ridge line were a killing ground of burning wrecks and corpses. Thousands were dead, thousands more still would die.

It irked Horus that the Cruor Angelus had not made good on its promise to turn the Blood Angels. Given that he had upset the schemes of Erebus to prevent that very thing on Signus, the irony was not lost on him.

‘And Aximand is bogged down on the right against forces from the Thirteenth Legion,’ continued Maloghurst. ‘It’s going to take a Sons of Horus speartip to get through that line. You need to deploy the rest of the Legion and Titan forces.’

‘Mal, are you telling me my business?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Good,’ said Horus. ‘Because I see the complexity of war differently to other men. Killing on this scale isn’t only about numbers and movement on a battlefield. Just by observing them I shape them and bend them to my will. Can you imagine any of my brothers mastering so chaotic an endeavour as war as I do?’

‘No, sir.’

Horus waved an admonishing finger. ‘Come on, Mal, you’re better than that. Stop sounding like a sycophant. Answer honestly.’

Maloghurst bowed and said, ‘Perhaps Guilliman.’

‘Too obvious,’ said Horus. ‘Some think he has no heart for war, that all he cares about are grand plans and stratagems. They’re wrong. He knows war as well as I do, he just wishes he didn’t.’

‘Then perhaps Dorn?’

‘No, too hidebound,’ said Horus. ‘Nor the Lion or Vulkan. And not the Khan, though he and I are so very close in alignment.’

‘Then who?’

‘Ferrus,’ answered Horus, tapping the lid of the ornately wrought box of lacquered wood and iron that sat next to him.

‘If he was so capable, then why is he dead?’

‘I didn’t say he was perfect,’ said Horus, leaning forward as the hololith hazed with static as it updated. ‘But he knew war like no other. Terra would already be ours if he had joined us, if my Phoenician brother had handled the approach with a modicum of subtlety.’

‘Subtlety was never Fulgrim’s strong suit,’ said Maloghurst.

‘No, but that lack has played in our favour here.’

‘It has?’

‘The power Fulgrim so willingly embraced has whispered honey in the dreams of Molech’s rulers for many years,’ said Horus. ‘Those dreams are about to become reality. And when they do, trust me, Mal, you’ll be glad we kept so far away.’

A stone lintel cracked and slammed down, blocking further progress along the trench. A firestorm raged overhead and Abaddon pressed himself flat against the vitrified stone wall as flames roared along its length. Fire was little threat to Terminator armour, but this was weaponised plasma from a Titan’s weapon.

An Imperator Titan.

Paragon of Terra’s guns were ripping the world apart.

Missiles, explosive shells, hurricanes of bolter fire, laser fire and killing beams from volcano cannon. What little was left of the trenches and strongpoints of this flank were being reduced to shot-blasted powder.

The Justaerin could survive a great deal, more than any other living thing on the battlefield, but the damned Imperator was going to kill them all. The walls of the trench blew inwards with the shock wave of another weapon system. Abaddon pushed away chunks of hot stone and metal.

A veteran hauled Abaddon clear with his one remaining arm. The other ended at the shoulder where the pressure wave of a passing gatling shell had ripped it away. Another weapon fired overhead, something with solid rounds, though Abaddon could no longer pick one weapon’s fire from another. The overpressure of the cycling rounds battered his armour like an army of aggrieved forge-smiths.

Everything merged into one continuous thunder of explosions, percussive hammer blows on the ground and searing thunderstorms of impossibly bright light that burned everything they touched.

The trenches had provided some cover, but they were no match for the holocaust-level destruction an Imperator could unleash. He doubted half his warriors had survived this far. Another few minutes and they would all be dead.

‘What was the Warmaster thinking sending us into this?’ yelled Kibre, stumbling from a blockhouse of adamantium made soft as butter by the plasma fire. Abaddon saw the corpses of at least a dozen Justaerin within. More filled the trench system around him, but he couldn’t see them. Too many red icons to know how many were dead, how many alive.

More dead than he’d ever thought to see among the Justaerin.

‘How are we supposed to get past that Imperator?’

Abaddon had no answer for the Widowmaker, and set off down the trench. Movement was their only ally. To remain static was to die.

More explosions shook the trenches. The ground split and vomited earth and smoke. It felt like the very bedrock of Molech was breaking apart. Abaddon half expected to see lakes of magma ooze up from the cracks in the earth. Hundreds of las-blasts roared overhead, a horizontal rain of killing light. More explosions, more fire, more detonations, more death.

His one-armed rescuer died as three spinning pieces of rebar sliced through his chest, pinning him to the rock. Two plunged into the ground less than half a metre from Kibre. Abaddon grinned and shook his head.

A world-shaking impact burst the walls of the trench. Fire-fused glass cracked and fell to the ground. Burned earth poured in from above. Ruptured bodies came with it, threatening to bury them alive with the men they had killed.

‘Now what?’ demanded Kibre, pushing along the corpse-choked trench behind Abaddon. Explosions chased them. Debris rained and the sky turned to fire.

Abaddon paused.

‘That wasn’t a weapon,’ he said.

‘Then what in the nine hells was it?’

‘A footstep,’ said Abaddon. ‘It’s the Imperator. It’s coming to crush us.’

The End Times had come to Molech. This was to be the last ride of the Stormlord, a final sally into the jaws of death. His noble vajra knights rode with him as they faced the daemon beast and the world’s ending.

It towered over everything, a mountain-sized creature of darkness that was swallowing the world with its every breath. The black and white of its scales was only eclipsed by the fire surrounding it.

Fire from its daemonic breath and fire from its sorcerous fists.

It was unmaking the world, and though it would surely cost him his life, he knew he had to try and stop it. His steed bucked beneath him, its animal brain understandably reluctant to ride into the fire of its doom.

He quelled it with a sharp thought.

But on the back of that thought came another, a treacherous and unbecoming one. A mortal thought.

This is not real, it said, this is fantasy...

The voice grew louder until it was screaming in his skull. The Stormlord tried to shut it out, but it only grew more intense. And for a moment the towering form of the dragon wavered. Its outline blurred and Albard saw just what he was charging towards.

Albard? Yes, Albard...

He was the Stormlord.

No, he was Albard Devine. Firstborn Scion of Cyprian Devine, Knight Seneschal of Molech, Imperial commander in the Imperium of Man. This was his world.

A poison veil fell from Albard’s fevered eyes and he saw the interior of the Banelash’s canopy through the mist of his one remaining eye. He reclined in a fluid place of unnatural angles and billowing musks. Of silks and gold and gems. The interior was no longer machine-smoothed metal, but possessed the fleshy, furred texture of a pleasure palace.

Where before he had interfaced with the Knight’s operation via the spinal implants, now his wasted body was a mass of writhing, serpentine ropes that oozed from the warped interior. Their ends were puckered with lamprey-like mouths. Tiny needle teeth buried in the meat of his limbs as they fed on him and filled his veins with their scented toxins.

‘No!’ screamed Albard, but laughter was his only answer.

One brother rejects me and tries to kill me – do you think I will let another do the same?

‘I am Albard Devine!’ he cried, holding onto his sense of self as blissful ecstasies filled his mind with pleasure. ‘I am...’

His protests died as the fronds caressing his limbs withdrew and he saw what he had become. Beneath the mouths of the mass of snake-like feelers, he was naked, but he was not the ravaged specimen of wretchedness he’d expected.

Albard wept to see strong thighs with well-defined quadriceps. His belly was flat and cut with abdominal muscles. His pectorals were the very epitome of sculpted perfection. He was a god among men, as perfect as the gilded statues of the Emperor’s sons that flanked the approach to the Sanctuary.

The years since his failed Becoming were wiped away and all that he could have been was revealed. This was what he should have been, this was what Raeven and Lyx had stolen from him.

This was what the Serpent Gods had offered Raeven and what he had selfishly thrown back in their faces. He would not make that mistake. Albard would live up to the promise of all he had been raised to expect. His would be a life of glory lived for the Serpent Gods.

What they offered was everything he had been denied.

The broken psyche that was Albard Devine had no chance against such blandishments and the force of his own ambitions.

‘I am yours...’ he whispered, and the lamprey-like mouths of the snake fronds fastened on his limbs once again. The pain of their teeth upon his perfect body was a welcome pain. He convulsed as the heady mix of daemonic elixirs coursed around his body. The sensation of bliss was unstoppable, matched only by his horror at the crippled thing he had once been.

Albard blinked and the interior of the pilot’s canopy was wiped from his sight.

The Stormlord’s warhorse rode towards the towering beast of black and white as it turned its killing fire on a host of brave foot knights making a last stand by a flame-belching crater where once had stood a mighty fortress.

‘Vajras!’ he bellowed. ‘Ride with me to victory!’

In the end, it wasn’t natural Cthonian ferocity or hot-as-hell-in-the-heart resilience that saved Aximand’s Sons of Horus. Nor was it any small-unit tactics of uncommon brilliance or heroic leadership from a charismatic officer.

In the end it was Titans that saved them.

Mourn-it-all had reaped a fearsome tally, its edge as sharp as the day the Warmaster had restored it. But a sharp sword and an arm to swing it weren’t enough. The Sons of Horus fought a desperate retreat through the maze of shattered blocks that was all that remained of the flanking wall, harried at every turn by vengeful Ultramarines.

Hundreds of warriors grappled and stabbed and shot one another in the fog of explosions and burning propellant. Wrecked vehicles lay strewn in the rubble. Random rounds cooked off and crackled in the flames. Mortal soldiers unlucky enough to be caught in the middle were killed within moments, crushed in the fray, hacked open or shredded in withering crossfire.

This was Legion war. Mortals had no place in it.

Bolter shells caromed off Aximand’s armour, swords gouged the bonded ceramite and explosions battered him with debris. All semblance of purpose and control among the combatants was eroded in the smoking, flame-lit nightmare. Even in the chaos, Aximand knew the Ultramarines held the upper hand. With every hacking sweep, every snatched pistol shot, the Sons of Horus were a step closer to defeat.

Aximand had killed seventeen Ultramarines.

An admirable ratio, but not without its cost.

Aximand’s right shoulder guard was gone, torn away by the heavy blast of an emplaced autocannon. The flesh beneath was burned black and every movement of the arm brought a hiss of pain to his lips. His plastron was cracked and the coolant pipes crossing underneath spewed chemicals down his legs in oily sheets. Regrown vertebrae protested at his sudden movements, the grafted bone not yet fully bedded in.

But the fight wasn’t lost.

For all their damned practical, for all that they held the upper hand, the Ultramarines couldn’t put the Sons of Horus to rout. Almost any other foe would have broken in the face of such a relentless killing machine of war, but the Sons of Horus were weaned on blood. They gave ground only in blood.

And that had earned them a reprieve.

Unimaginably powerful weapons discharged behind Aximand. The kind that would kill you without you even knowing it, the kind that would atomise every molecule of your body before the brain even registered the muzzle flash.

Now that weaponry was turned on the warriors of the XIII Legion.

A column of incandescent light erupted in the heart of the blue-armoured warriors. Plasma washed up like a geyser as the white heat of a blastgun turned its heat on the enemy infantry.

A one-armed Warhound climbed to the top of the rubble, its hull pitted with stubber impacts. Void shield haze clung to its ripped carapace like corposant, and oily blood streamed from its underside.

Bloodveil.

Its remaining arm unleashed a withering fan of turbo fire. Ultramarines were hollowed out, sliced open and boiled within their armour. Killing light speared through the ruins. Five metre spurts of vapour and fragmented armour stitched through the rubble. Two dozen warriors were cut down in the blink of an eye.

The white-heat of the laser weapon’s discharge burned the fog and Aximand punched the air like the old days when he saw the limping giant, Silence of Death, approaching. The Reaver had been taken apart, its armour in tatters and both its arms destroyed. The Knights had almost brought the Reaver down, but going head to head with a Battle Titan, any hope of victory had always been slender.

The Reaver’s apocalypse launcher filled the sky with dozens of missiles. Then a dozen more. Streaking darts of light arced overhead and slashed down in a hammering series of explosions that merged into one continuous roar of detonation.

Atop the rubble, Bloodveil threw back its head and loosed an ululating blast of its warhorn. A bellow of victory or a paean of loss? Aximand couldn’t tell.

Silence of Death crashed down onto its knees, its upper carapace swaying as flames erupted from the princeps canopy. The Interfector engine had turned the fight around, but it would take no further part in the battle.

The thunder of explosions shook the earth and Aximand gripped a bent iron girder jutting from the ruins to take a breath.

In the precious moment he had, Aximand reloaded his bolter.

Last magazine.

Then he saw he wouldn’t need it.

Withdrawing in good order from battle was one of the most difficult manoeuvres a formation could make. Doing it under fire made it next to impossible.

Yet that was what the Ultramarines had done.

Yade Durso staggered through the smoke, looking as though he’d gone toe-to-toe with the Knights himself.

‘You made it,’ said Aximand.

‘Lupercal helped me,’ said Durso, holding up his hand.

The golden Eye of Horus that Durso had carried was melted into his palm, forever to be part of his gauntlet. Its outline was heat softened, but still clearly recognisable.

‘I was bolter dry and sword broken,’ said Durso. ‘A Thirteenth Legion bastard had me dead to rights.’

‘So what happened?’

Durso clenched his fist. ‘I had to punch his damn head off.’

The hololith filled with multiple inloads coming from orbital survey tracks. A wealth of data filled the slate. New icons, new force vectors. Unknown contacts.

Unknown to the battle cogitators, corrected Horus.

Not unknown to me.

‘You are a wonder, my indomitable brother,’ said Horus. He stood and his presence filled the pavilion with bellicose intent.

Maloghurst bent to the slate, his eyes darting between the multiple inloads.

‘Send word to the Legion,’ said Horus, lifting Worldbreaker from the nearest weapon rack. ‘Full advance. It’s time to end this.’

‘Is that...?’ began Maloghurst, his finger tracing a line of sigils advancing from the south.

‘It is,’ said Horus. ‘Right where I need him to be and just when I need him.’

‘How could you know he would arrive right at this moment?’

‘I’m the Warmaster,’ said Horus. ‘It’s not just a pretty title.’

Tyana Kourion fought the Battle of Lupercalia from the interior of her Stormhammer. Even protected by many centimetres of layered adamantium and steel plating, the sturm und drang of the apocalyptic conflict was still a symphony of thunder and hammer blows on the side of the superheavy.

The roar of its engine and the world-shaking crash of its multiple weapon systems made ear-defenders a necessity. It was cramped, deafening and stank of oil and sweat and fear. Each second this battle raged, hundreds of her soldiers were dying. It was her job to win this battle quickly.

Half a dozen data-slates parsed inloading information from vox-reports, pict-capture, auspex feeds and visual tagging.

No battle ever went according to plan, and today was no exception. The loss of the Blood Angels had horrified her, but their suicidal charge had bowed the enemy line, giving her guns more chance to savage the advance.

Was that worth the deaths of a hundred Legion warriors?

No, but better to make use of it than lament it.

The fighting had evolved naturally into a shifting tide of heady charges, strategic withdrawals, outright routs and flowing thrusts. Imperial and traitor tanks duelled in their own miniature battlefields, each one a tiny piece of a greater whole; hooking flanking manoeuvres, pincer traps and staggered echelons.

The Titans of Gryphonicus and Crucius waged war on a plane far removed from that of the mortals fighting in their colossal shadows. They fought with weapons whose venting could burn an entire company to death. It was war on a scale where ejected shells could crush a squadron of armoured transports and a misplaced step could destroy an entire battalion.

Sensible commanders avoided being anywhere near engines at war, but sometimes there was no escaping their monstrous presence. Like giants among ants, the Titans crashed and battered one another and their deaths took hundreds of warriors on both sides with them.

Gryphonicus’s complement of Titans was primarily Warhounds, and they had harried the flanks. At least four were gone, either buried in the mountain’s ruin or surrounded and gunned down by Legio Vulcanum’s more numerous Reavers.

The enemy Titans had started the day with the numerical advantage, but Paragon of Terra had steadily eroded that advantage to the point where the engine forces were more or less at parity. At the current rate of attrition, the Imperial engines would soon outnumber those of the Warmaster.

‘More Chimeras and mass-transit carriers coming through on the right,’ observed Naylor. ‘We can’t ignore it any longer. Soon they’ll have enough massed to pose a serious threat there.’

‘Crucius and Gryphonicus aren’t stopping them?’ asked Kourion.

‘They’re wreaking bloody murder on the Mechanicum war machines and their superheavies, but they’re ignoring a lot of the infantry carriers.’

‘They’re beneath them,’ replied Kourion.

‘They’ll be right on bloody top of us unless we push them back before they’ve enough numbers to threaten that flank.’

‘Agreed,’ said Kourion, pulling the battle-inload from the right flank to her main slate. Her eyes scanned the dozens of icons there, quickly assessing their worth and combat effectiveness.

Nothing left alive there with the strength to mount an effective counterattack. She haptically swept up the centre and reserves.

One force icon stood out above all others.

‘There,’ she said, jabbing a finger. ‘That’s our best chance to throw them back. Get them in the damn fight.’

Naylor nodded. ‘Good choice. No combat degradation and perfectly positioned to support the Titans.’

‘Send the orders,’ said Kourion, turning her attention to the confusing haze of gross-displacement weapon discharges on the left where Castor Alcade’s Ultramarines were deployed. She didn’t know what was happening there and that was unacceptable.

Naylor dialed into the local vox-net.

‘Lord Devine,’ said Naylor, exloading a series of engagement vectors. ‘You and your knights are ordered to immediately engage the enemy at the following grid-sectors.’

Vox-static hissed in reply.

The multi-tiered command bridge of Paragon of Terra smelled of oil and incense, hot circuitry and anger. Two hundred calculus logi, servitors and deck crew were plugged into tactica-engines and command consoles, reviewing encrypted vox from every element of Tyana Kourion’s battle-net. A constant drone of low-level binary and hushed voices blended with hot, grainy static and clicking prayers. Heat bled into every system, the anger of the Titan’s machine-spirit rendering every system with a red haze.

Angled slates projected news from all over Molech, hanging in drifting entoptic veils of light. Each one only served to stoke the nuclear heart of the Titan’s rage.

An Imperator Titan was a land-bound starship, as powerful and as demanding a mistress as any void craft. Crewed by thousands throughout its towering height, it was as complex a machine as had ever been built by the hands of man. Only the secret designs of the Ark Mechanicum dared approach the complexity of an Imperator.

To give life to so immense a machine and set it to motion was an entirely different thing to setting a ship in space. Zero gravity forgave a great many things that planetary environments did not.

Its Manifold was a proud, regal thing. An apex predator without rivals, a lord of battle with fangs no other could match and a fury equalled only by its commander.

Princeps Kalonice stood at the jutting prow of the strategium, hands braced on her hips as she drank in the data inloads feeding into the Manifold. She swiped a mechanical hand through the various projections, parting them like smoke and inloading them instantaneously.

Encased in the body-carapace of a Lorica Thallax, all that remained of Etana Kalonice was her skull and spine, fused within the mechanised body of meticulous construction. With reverse-jointed piston legs and wheezing, clicking mechanical joints, she was a robot in all but consciousness.

Contoured plates of porcelain-white armour encased her organic material, and hair-fine copper mind impulse unit cabling allowed her to interface with the fiendishly intricate mechanisms of Paragon of Terra without a gel-filled casket. To be so bound to a machine body was exquisite agony, but Kalonice would rather face a lifetime of pain than permanent entombment.

<Mister Sular,> she said. <Assessment?>

Algorithmic resonators translated synaptic activity into sounds and allowed Kalonice’s voice to sound virtually human. It almost took away the edge of pain, but not quite.

A flurry of topographical images bloomed at her senior moderati’s station. Maps, threat vectors, combat prognoses. Paragon of Terra’s preferred targets jostled for his attention, but Sular suppressed them in favour of answering his princeps.

‘The Warmaster has fatally underestimated the resistance he would face, ma’am,’ said Sular, a torso with mechanised arms fused with the battle-logister. ‘The Imperial line has collapsed in a number of places, but not enough for a breakthrough. A good defence in depth and numerous flanking sallies have allowed General Kourion’s reserve forces to meet each breakthrough and contain it.’

<Except this one,> said Kalonice.

‘With respect to General Kourion, the destruction of Iron Fist Mountain was unthinkable.’

<The Warmaster thought it,> she said, feeling the spike of the Imperator’s desire for revenge through her spine like a shank.

The Legio Crucius fortress was gone, reduced to a seething, volcanic ruin by orbital fury. All their history, all their connections to their sister Legios gone. In one fell swoop, the Warmaster had brought Legio Crucius to the edge of extinction.

‘And we’ll make them pay for that,’ said Carthal Ashur, pacing the deck like a man on a crowded stage with no role to play.

<That we will, Mister Ashur, but please sit down. You are distracting me, and I do not need distractions now.>

‘Apologies ma’am,’ said Ashur, forcing himself onto a vacant supplicant’s bench.

She’d met Carthal Ashur many years ago, had even once bedded him when there was still enough of her to make such a prospect tenable. He’d been a disappointment, but his talent with words and mortals had persuaded her to keep him around as Calator Martialis.

‘Multiple targets inbound,’ reported Moderati Sular. ‘Two dozen main battle tanks. Six superheavies. Supporting infantry, battalion strength.’

‘Any Titan killers?’ asked Ashur.

Kalonice could taste his sweat over the scented oils of the bridge, a mix of eagerness and unfamiliarity. He’d been part of Legio Crucius for decades, but this was only his third time aboard a Battle Titan. His first in battle.

Moderati Sular looked to Kalonice, and she nodded her assent for him to answer Ashur’s question.

‘Shadowswords, aye,’ said Sular, sweeping the data over to the strategium. ‘Some traitor Mechanicum elements too. Highlighting.’

The local area around the Imperator was rendered in cascades of binary, illuminating forces both friendly and enemy. Tanks, infantry, Knights, artillery.

Each of the enemy icons already had a target solution plotted, the Mechanicum elements and superheavies assigned kill-priority.

Paragon of Terra was anticipating her, and Kalonice let it.

Ten Shadowswords with volcano cannons. Unidentified Mechanicum battle-engines – a mix of Ordinatus and Titan, each armed with weapons capable of wreaking great harm on her.

If they could be brought to bear.

<Ready the hellstorm,> she ordered. <Magos Surann? How long until the annihilator is ready?>

‘Information – five seconds,’ answered Magos Surann from the raised gallery behind her, where plugged Mechanicum adepts sat in rows like a binary choir.

<Perfect,> said Kalonice, bunching a fist at her side as readiness icons flashed up from the multiple weapon systems atop the battlements at the Titan’s shoulders. Her Thallax body was limber and agile, but the sensory weight of the Imperator was immense. At times like this, she could accept there were some benefits to being held weightless within amniotic gels.

She felt stabbing prickles all across her body. Her void shields were taking hits, scrappy and uncoordinated, but hits nonetheless. The infantry she’d stepped over had heavy weapons. Nothing individually capable of harming her or taking out a void shield, but irritating nonetheless.

The Shadowswords were firing, the bright spears of their volcano cannons bursting shields and overloading the pylons.

‘The voids are taking hits,’ said Ashur, as though she wouldn’t already know that.

<I said no distractions,> said Kalonice, issuing an engagement order to every weapon section. <Open fire.>

Kalonice let each of her weapons systems have its head, allowing the moderati and techs to wreak their own devastation. They all deserved a measure of the spoils of vengeance. The recoil from so many vast weapon systems was dampened by multiple suspensor webs and pneumatic compensators, but still shook the command bridge with the force of so many discharges.

Enemy icons vanished from the Manifold, dozens at a time.

But she kept the plasma annihilator for herself, zeroing in on a towering engine of bronze and brass worked with skulls and lurching towards her on spiked wheels. A corrupted engine of the Mechanicum, a hateful reminder of treachery within her own order.

Kalonice drew power from the boiling reactor core at her heart. The heat was immense, and she drew and drew from the well of plasma fire until the screaming agony in her right fist was almost too much to bear.

<You’re mine,> she said, but even as the algorithmic resonator formed the words, Kalonice felt an icy cold knife slide into her lower back. Illusory, but no less painful for that.

The pain broke her hold on the plasma fury encased in her fist and the arm vanished in a furious supernova of white fire that rocked the Imperator back on its heels. Kalonice screamed, the resonators having no problem rendering the depths of her agony.

Her Thallax body fell to the deck, bio-feedback bathing her machine-wrapped spinal column in pain signals. The pain was overwhelming, all-consuming. Kalonice fought to shut herself off to the sensations, but Paragon of Terra’s pain was hers now. The reactor at her heart convulsed. Armour plating buckled, atomic bleed-off vented explosively from cycling louvres on the Titan’s rear quarters.

Alarms blared. Binaric horns screamed their agonies into the command bridge. Damage controls blew out in overload and the red light of anger became a blood light of horrifying pain. Kalonice struggled to hold on, to not let the loss of her arm break her grip on the Manifold. She heard the machine-spirit of the Titan howling, an animal vocalisation of impossible pain.

‘Etana!’ cried a voice. A flesh voice. One she knew.

<Carthal?> she gasped.

‘It’s me,’ he said, hauling her to her feet. She looked down at her right arm, expecting to see it as a mangled, molten mess. But, of course, it was undamaged. Paragon of Terra had borne the hurt, but she had felt it. Oh, how she had felt it!

<What happened?>

‘They hit us,’ said Ashur. ‘The bastards hit us hard.’

<How?> she said, gradually inloading jagged shards of data. <We still have voids in place.>

‘It came from inside the voids,’ said Ashur, flinching as the Imperator rocked with the force of impacts.

Kalonice felt the impacts. Searing, stabbing blades plunging into her machine body.

‘It’s House Devine!’ said Ashur.

<House Devine? Clarify.>

‘The bastards have betrayed us,’ hissed Ashur.

The dragon was screaming. It bled smoke and light from its wounds, and the Stormlord closed for the kill. He rammed his lance into the beast’s flanks, hearing the splinter of bones and the hiss of slicing flesh. His other arm was a crackling whip, useless against such a towering beast, but lethal to the tiny, scurrying things that spilled from its legs.

He circled around again, bringing his lance to bear as a storm of spines blasted from the beast’s carapace. A knight fell, pierced through by one such barb and he came apart in an explosion of blood and horsemeat.

The towering beast staggered. Their sudden attack had caught it off guard and almost brought it to its knees. But he had not thought to humble it with one strike. Already it was reacting to them, but the Stormlord had not earned himself that name without good reason.

He wheeled around the crashing footfall of the beast. The thunderous impact shook the ground for kilometres in all directions. His horse reared in panic, but he quelled it with the force of his will.

His knights circled back and forth, closing in time and again to deliver thrusts of their lances and stabbing cuts from their reapers. They were hurting it, but it was too big to be brought down by such wounds.

He looked up and saw the beast’s wounded heart, a pulsing shimmer of light where the source of its power lay. Thick scales of draconic armour protected its heart from a frontal attack, but from behind...

From behind it was vulnerable. Even more so now. The Stormlord’s first thrust had hurt the beast and exposed its greatest weakness.

‘Warriors of Molech!’ shouted the Stormlord. ‘No one lance can pierce this beast’s armour. We must be as one in our ardour, as one in our thrust into its heart.’

A breath of fire incinerated another of his vajras. If the killing blow was not struck soon, the beast would overwhelm them. It was already turning its wounded heart away.

‘Your lances!’ screamed the Stormlord. ‘Unite them with mine!’

His knights formed up around him as they rode with all possible speed to chase the dragon’s wounded heart. It bled light and steam, the exhalations of a monster the world needed slain.

The Stormlord laughed as he felt the strength of his knights fill him. Their lance arms were now his. What he stabbed, they stabbed. What he killed, they would kill.

The leavings of the beast still streamed from its gigantic legs. Ants and bacterium shed from a desperate creature that knew its ending was at hand, but still clung to life. Hundreds of them, thousands perhaps. The vajras fought and killed them with their battle blades alone, for their lance arms were now his to command.

His armour shuddered with impacts, his shield arm was just as strong as his lance arm. He felt the heat of the conjoined lances in his fingers, the potency of a weapon on the brink of release.

The dragon knew what he was doing.

It knew he had the power to kill it.

He was too fast for it, the fleetness of his steed more than a match for its cumbersome power. No matter how fast it tried to turn, he would be quicker. It spat a breath of fire to the ground, incinerating a host of its own defenders in its desperation. The Stormlord felt one of his vajras die, and cried out as he felt the righteous fury of the knight fill him.

The spirits of the dead flowed into him, filling his skull with their death screams. Any other man would have been driven mad by now, but he was the Stormlord. He was the hero, the saviour of Molech and he would end this beast.

And then he saw it exposed, the beast’s one weakness.

The Stormlord thrust his lance deep into the exposed heart of his prey.

And where he stabbed, so too did his warriors.

What remained of the XIII Legion forces followed pre-prepared evacuation routes down the Untar Mesas. Three Rhinos with little of the cobalt-blue of Ultramar left on their structure after the devastating barrages of plasma fire.

Barely a handful had survived the slaughter. The Sons of Horus had the left flank, and were pouring in heavy armour. Army units of artillery were racing to occupy the high ground and more Interfector engines were pushing to complete the flank’s collapse.

The slate before Arcadon Kyro completed its auspex sweep, but came up empty. No Ultramarines armour locators that weren’t already aboard the withdrawing Rhinos.

‘Are there any more?’ asked Castor Alcade, and the desperate hope Kyro heard was a whip to an already bloodied back.

‘No, sir,’ he replied, his voice strained and hoarse. A breath of superheated air had scalded the inside of his lungs. If he survived this battle, they’d need replacing. ‘This is it.’

‘Three damn squads!’ hissed Alcade, slamming a fist against the buckled interior of the Rhino. ‘How can that be all that’s left?’

‘We were hit by Titans,’ said Kyro. ‘We’re Thirteenth Legion, but even we can’t soak up that kind of firepower.’

‘Keep looking,’ insisted Alcade.

‘If anyone else made it out, I’d know by now,’ said Kyro.

‘Keep looking, damn you. I want more of my men found.’

‘Sir, there’s no one left,’ said Kyro. ‘It’s just us.’

Alcade sagged and Kyro hated that he had to be the bearer of yet another turn of fate that saw his legate further humiliated.

He’d lost his helmet in the fighting, and his armour was blackened all over where a backwash of plasma had caught him. He’d suffered burns to most of his exposed flesh, and could feel the puckering tightness of wounds that would never heal.

Hot winds rammed into the Rhino through a gaping wound in the glacis. Virtually the entire frontal section had been sheared off in an explosion, leaving the driver’s compartment exposed. Instead of seeing the battlefield through external pict-feeds or a slender vision block, Kyro had a gaping hole large enough for two legionaries to climb through abreast of one another.

‘Any word from Salicar?’ asked Alcade. ‘We should link with the Blood Angels, pool our resources.’

Kyro didn’t answer, his attention snared by the hideous sight far across the battlefield. Even the intervening smoke of battle couldn’t obscure the horror of what he was seeing.

‘What in Guilliman’s name is going on over there?’ said Alcade.

Kyro shook his head. What it looked like was impossible.

The Knights of House Devine were attacking Paragon of Terra. Something had already wounded it. One arm was missing, and it staggered with shrieking feedback agonies. It bled corrosive fogs and fire. It had been hurt badly.

The Knights’ battle cannon punched craters in its legs. Their reapers were cutting down the skitarii and Army troops stationed in its leg bastions by the hundred. They darted in to fire thermal lances into its upper sections, peeling back its rear armour like foil paper.

‘What do they think they’re doing?’ demanded Alcade.

‘They’re traitors,’ hissed Kyro, unwilling to believe it, despite the evidence of his own eyes. ‘Raeven Devine has been with Horus this whole time!’

‘Then his life is mine,’ said Alcade.

Kyro ignored the legate’s bombasts, and fixed his attention on the lead Knight. A red gold machine with a golden banner streaming from its carapace and a crackling energy lash whipping at its side. He knew it as Banelash.

It skidded to a halt behind the Imperator and braced its legs.

‘They can’t hurt it can they?’ said Alcade. ‘They’re too small, surely. An Imperator’s far too big to–’

Raeven Devine’s Knight unleashed a stream of white-hot fire from his thermal lance. And for a fleeting second, Arcadon Kyro believed his legate might be correct.

Then that hope was dashed as every Knight of House Devine combined their lance fire into one incandescent beam of killing light. Combined to hideous effect, the lance fire punched through the weakened armour of Paragon of Terra.

Kyro’s senses were enhanced. He saw in spectra beyond those of unaugmented mortals, and knew immediately that the Imperator was doomed. He read the breaching of the vast reactor at the heart of Paragon of Terra as clear as the slate before him. Soaring temperature increases, coupled with spewing gouts of radioactive fire throughout the Titan’s superstructure told a cascading tale of the Imperator’s death.

The Knights knew it too and were already fleeing from their murder. Banelash led the Knights of House Devine towards the rear of the Imperial army, sprinting for all they were worth.

Paragon of Terra stood unmoving, and Kyro wept to see so magnificent an icon of mankind’s mastery of technology brought low.

‘Come on, come on,’ he hissed, willing the Mechanicum adepts and their servitors to vent the reactor, to eject what they could and save the rest, even though he already knew it was too late.

The thermal auspex blew out in a haze of sparks.

Kyro turned away and his auto-senses dimmed in response.

‘Don’t look at it,’ he warned.

Castor Alcade was more or less correct when he surmised that the Knights were far too insignificant to do more than inconvenience an Imperator. Their uncannily concentrated fire had caused a cascading series of reactor breaches within the engineering decks, but even that damage could have been contained.

As the adepts aboard Paragon of Terra initiated damage aversion protocols to avert a catastrophic reactor breach they were betrayed from within as well as without. Many of the Sacristans they had been forced to employ within the reactor spaces were those belonging to the Knight Households.

And by some considerable margin, the majority of these men had come from House Devine.

Quiet sabotage of venting systems, disabling of the coolant mechanisms and, in the end, the brutal murder of senior adepts, made an apocalyptic reactor breach inevitable.

The reactor empowering a Titan was a caged star.

Not a tamed one, never that.

And the reactor at the heart of an Imperator was orders of magnitude greater than all others.

The breach vaporised the entirety of Paragon of Terra in the blink of an eye and a seething eruption of plasma blew out in a cloud of expanding white heat.

The flash blinded all who looked upon it, burning the eyes from their skulls. Everything within a fifteen hundred metre radius of the Imperator simply vanished, incinerated to ash or reduced to molten metal in the blink of an eye.

Nightmarish temperatures and pressures at the point of detonation turned the earth to glass and blasted hot gaseous residue from the centre of the explosion at ferocious velocities. Contained within a dense hydrodynamic front, the explosion was a hammering piston compressing the surrounding air and smashing apart everything it struck. A hemispherically expanding blast wave raced after the roaring plasmic fireball, but quickly eclipsed its blazing fury.

The overpressure at ground zero was enormous, gouging a crater deep into the surface of Molech and hurling even the largest of war machines through the air like grains of wheat blown from a farmer’s palm.

In the first instant of detonation, the death toll on both sides was in the tens of thousands. It rose exponentially in the following seconds. Mere mortals within four kilometres of the explosion were killed almost instantly, pulped by the overpressure as it rolled outwards.

Beyond that, those soldiers in cover or within reinforced blockhouses survived a few seconds longer until thunderous blast waves hammered down. Every strongpoint and trench system collapsed, and only the very fortunate or heavily armoured survived this stage of the explosion.

Towards the flanks, the seismic force swatted soldiers to the ground and halted the fighting as the enormity of what had just happened hit home.

A smoke-hazed mushroom cloud of plasma bled into the sky, reaching up to a height of thirteen kilometres and surrounded by ever-expanding coronas of blue-hot fire. Searing winds roared across the agri-plains north of Lupercalia, searing them of vegetation and life.

Those that survived would have plasma burns to rival any mark earned on other worlds torn apart by war. The centre of the Imperial line was gone, but thousands of soldiers and armoured vehicles remained to fight.

The destruction of Paragon of Terra was only the beginning of the end for Molech.

To the north and south, just beyond the farthest extent of the blast wave, dust clouds hazed the horizon as fresh forces were drawn to the vortex of battle.

Castor Alcade gripped tight to the battered flank of his Rhino, disbelief warring with horror at the sight of the Imperator’s destruction. The field of battle was in disarray, men and women crawling from the wreckage and trying to make sense of what had just happened.

Virtually the entire muster of Imperial war engines had fought in the shadow of Paragon of Terra, and were little more than smouldering wrecks, barely enough of them remaining to identify which engine was which.

‘It’s over,’ said Didacus Theron, stepping down from his Rhino.

‘No,’ said Alcade, pointing to where scattered command sections struggled to impose a semblance of order on what was left of their forces. ‘We march for Molech.’

‘But we don’t have to die for it,’ said Theron.

‘Hold your damn tongue,’ said Kyro.

‘And remember your place,’ snapped Theron, coming over to stand beside Alcade. ‘Legate, we don’t have to die here, not when Ultramar is at war and the Avenging Son needs us at his side.’

Alcade said nothing, for once in his life at a loss of what to do. Theoretical was everything, but what was the theoretical when every practical ended in death?

Amid the raging fire-swept wasteland below, Alcade saw the enemy had not been spared the horror of the explosion either. Their numbers were just as devastated. Only the enemy Titans had survived the blast intact, though even they had suffered heinous damage.

They stalked as shadows through the wall of dust and smoke thrown up by the explosion. Giant killers with nothing to oppose them. Even if the Imperial commanders below could rally their troops, what weapon did they have remaining that could fight traitor war engines?

‘We need to go back to Lupercalia,’ said Theron.

‘And then what?’ demanded Kyro.

‘We leave Molech,’ said Theron.

‘How? We have no ship.’

‘Then we take one from the enemy by force,’ said Theron. ‘We find an isolated vessel and storm it. Then we blast out-system and get back to the Five Hundred Worlds.’

‘You already censured a dozen legionaries that dared to voice that sentiment, Theron,’ said Kyro. ‘I see a few red helmets among our pitiful survivors.’

‘That was before the war was ended at a single stroke,’ countered Theron, turning his attention back to Alcade. ‘Sir, we can’t stay here. Dying on Molech will achieve nothing. There’s no practical to it. We need to go home and fight in a battle we can actually win.’

‘We have a duty to Molech, Theron,’ said Kyro. ‘We’re oathed to its defence, bound by the word of the Emperor.’

Castor Alcade let his subordinate’s words wash over him, knowing both were right, and both dead wrong. He rubbed a hand over his face, wiping away the grit and blood of battle. He blinked at yet another black mark against his name, another failure to add to the tally of near-misses and also-rans.

‘Sir, what are your orders?’ asked Kyro.

Alcade turned and put one foot up on the running board of the scorched Rhino, sparing a last look at the hell unleashed below. On the horizon were the unmistakable dust clouds of advancing armour. Lots of armour.

‘Get us to Lupercalia,’ said Castor Alcade.

‘Sir–’ began Kyro, but Alcade held up his hand.

‘That is my order,’ said Alcade. ‘It’s to Lupercalia.’

Tyana Kourion crawled from the wreckage of her Stormhammer, half blinded and burned. Her dress greens were black with oil and stiff with blood pulsing steadily from her stomach. Some ribs were broken, and she doubted her left leg would ever bear her weight again. Her right hand was a fused mess of blackened stumps. It didn’t hurt yet. It would hurt later, assuming she lived long enough for there to be a later.

The superheavy lay on its side, one half black and folded in on itself like a plastek model left too close to the fire. The rubber of its joints and cupolas dribbled like wax and she saw the skeletal remains of her crew that had been flung from the explosion.

She didn’t know where they were.

Her ears were ringing with detonation and concussion. Sticky fluid leaked from each one. She could hear, but everything was muted and subdued, as though filtered through water. Dust gritted her eyes, but she saw flashes of the nightmare through lifting clouds of smoke, as though the rogue thermals knew enough not to haunt her with too many scenes of horror in too short a time.

She heard howls of wounded soldiers. Ammunition cooking off. Fuel tanks ablaze and thudding footfalls that could only be enemy war engines on the hunt. Bloodstained soldiers sometimes wandered through her blurred field of vision. Men and women with missing limbs and shattered, glazed looks on their faces. Some turned at the sight of her, but if they recognised their commanding officer, they gave no sign.

Her army was gone. Destroyed in a heartbeat of Devine treachery.

She’d heard the last snatches of vox-intercept from Paragon of Terra, but hadn’t understood them until she’d reversed the Stormhammer to face the Imperator. She’d only just turned away from the pict-slate when the explosion came.

How long ago had that been? Not long surely.

Her tank was nowhere near where it had been dug in, swatted hundreds of metres by the force of the blast. She should be dead, and didn’t like to think what horrendous forces had been exerted on the Stormhammer’s hull. The impact of landing had crushed pretty much everyone in her tank but her.

Right about now, it felt like she’d gotten the raw deal.

Kourion propped herself up against the underside of the Stormhammer. Blood pooled in her lap. She knew a mortal wound when she saw one. She fumbled for her pistol with her left hand. She’d never bothered to procure a fancy sidearm, and had no family heirlooms like some of the more stuck up regimental commanders. This was just a standard, Mars-pattern laspistol. Full charge, textured grip and iron sights. Functional, but without embellishment.

Just like her.

It would have to do. It was the only weapon she had left, and she’d read somewhere that it was good for a soldier to die holding a weapon.

A shadow moved in front of her. Something with a living being’s bulk and fluidity. Something that shouldn’t be here. A huge monster covered in grey-furred scales lumbered past her, its arms and shoulders corded with inhuman musculature.

She struggled to remember the local name for the beast.

Mallahgra. Yes, that was it.

What the hell was a mallahgra doing this far north? Weren’t they all confined to the mountains and jungles? Then she saw it wasn’t alone. Dozens of identical beasts rampaged through the bloodied survivors of her army, mauling and feasting with abandon. Their speed was prodigious and they swept injured soldiers with clawed arms and tore them apart before feeding them into their meat-grinder mouths.

Giant feline predators the size of cavalry mounts bounded across the battlefield. Uniformed bodies hung limp in their jaws. Packs fought for spoils of flesh as though starved. Flocks of loping bird-like creatures with long necks stampeded over the battlefield. Their snapping jaws snatched up fleeing soldiers and bit them in half. Only a few hours ago, this had been Kourion’s grand army. The noise of the beasts receded, replaced with the rumble of engines and the tramp of heavy, booted feet.

Shapes moved in the smoke and dust, humanoid, but bulkier and taller than even the abhuman migou. Armoured in filthy plates of ivory, they ploughed through the fog as though born to it, led by a giant in rags and plate who bore a towering reaper blade.

And marching towards him, with arms open, was a warrior of equal stature, shrouded in shadows, but upon whose breast burned an amber eye. He hadn’t even deigned to draw the great maul slung across his shoulders.

Words passed between the giants, words of a battle fought and a world conquered. Blood poured out of Kourion, and she fought to hear what the giants said, knowing now who spoke. She should despise these traitors, these godlike beings who had slaughtered her army, but hated that she felt only awe.

Her vision began to fade.

Spots of grey grew in her peripheral vision.

The Warmaster took Mortarion’s hand in the old way, wrist to wrist. A way that in an earlier epoch had been born of mistrust, but which now stood as the grip of honourable warriors.

‘Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, brother,’ said Mortarion, ‘and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.’

Horus looked around him at the devastation, the dead bodies, the ruined weapons of war and the bellowing monsters. He grinned.

‘In war, they will kill some of us,’ said Horus. ‘But we shall destroy all of them.’

The last thing Tyana Kourion saw was the two primarchs coming together in a clatter of plate, embracing as dearest brothers.

Embracing in victory.